Phil Brown's poetry is the kind of work you should give to people who think poetry is ‘elitist', or simply too hard to be bothered with.

His is the inspiration that comes while you are waiting for that pizza, hitching a ride to a country town on a misty morning, or watching a Chuck Norris video. It's a conversational style that hooks you like the opening lines of a good journalistic piece — no surprise here, since Brown is a journalist in his workaday world for Brisbane News , which helps him keep a finger on the artistic pulse of his hometown.

In one breath a speaker describes for his shrink how he got taken for $2000 on a health farm water diet, then in the next he compares himself to Eliot's Prufrock, who ‘wept and fasted, / wept and prayed—/ though not at the same time.'

There is substance and wit here for those willing to spend time with these poems.

Nor is he limited to Australia.

In “Mr Lai” he remarks on the staying power of the past — in his case, a memorable character from his childhood in Hong Kong: ‘the memory of that survives: / a bitter-sweet image of an era and / an unrecoverable past'.

This is poetry from inside the real world of a jaded, happy, metropolitan man.